[Linganth] Seeking panel participants for SLA 2020 - Language in Media: Endoresments, Subversions, and Anxieties

[Deina A Rabie]

Dear All,
Gwen Kirk and I are organizing a panel for SLA2020 in April. If interested,
please email us a 250-word abstract by Monday, November 25th.
Best wishes,
Deina and Gwen

*Language in Media: Endorsements, Subversions, and Anxieties*

*Organizers*:

Deina Rabie, PhD Candidate, Linguistic Anthropology, University of Texas at
Austin, drabie at utexas.edu

Gwendolyn Kirk, Assistant Professor, Gurmani Centre, LUMS,
gwendolyn.kirk at lums.edu.pk

*Discussant*: James Slotta, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University
of Texas at Austin

Now more than ever, media has emerged as a vital site of engagement in
political and cultural life and the circulation of information,
entertainment, and technologies. In this panel, we address language use in
media through two intersecting themes. The first examines the strategic
role of media personalities and questions the ways in which language is
deployed to tow political or corporate agendas, and the ways it is
subverted to create opportunities for social and political contestation. We
ask how the multimodal and rapidly diffusing structures of particular media
platforms or spaces serves state and corporate interests while creating
potential opportunities for appropriation by non-dominant parties and
voices. We also question whether there are particular languages or
registers better suited for the semiotic processes of knowledge circulation
and how they come to bear on questions of origin or authority.

Our second theme explores media as key sites in which linguistic anxieties
emerge and are codified. These especially come to the fore in neoliberal,
globalized spaces such as social media and corporate television, which are
also maximally intertextual and rapidly circulating. Media are utilized for
regulating and policing language and linguistic identity, and are routinely
credited with playing a role in language shift and loss. At the same time,
they create loci of possibility for emergent reconfigurations and
unexpected solidarities. This panel foregrounds the role the affordances of
media play in this process, drawing closer attention to its metadiscursive
and metalinguistic capacities. It also emphasizes the multimodality of
media communication, considering semiotic relationships between visual,
sonic, and linguistic dimensions.

Please send an abstract of *250 words* to drabie at utexas.edu by Monday,
November 25th, 2019.
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